A sincere “Thank You” to all who have helped our 2nd fan trailer “Heritage” reach 100,000 views on YouTube

A sincere “thank you” to everyone who has helped cause our second fan trailer “Heritage” to go from 20,000 views to 100,000 views on Youtube in one week — and not just any week. This was the same week in which Disney Studios announced that John Carter, with $184m in global box office at the time of the announcement, would cause the studio to incur a 200m writedown in the current quarter.  Given the media frenzy surrounding that announcement and the intense focus on the box office numbers and “epic fail” — it’s kind of extraordinary to see that fans, aside from joining the “Take Me Back to Barsoom!” group on Facebook, were actively responding to the second trailer in the midst of such chaos.   

In truth, although as longtime fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs we love the “Heritage” trailer for all that it says about the history and importance of the story and ERB’s role in inspiring great creative minds, we knowingly put this trailer “out there” with the awareness that its form is not that of a true trailer  (it incorporates artwork and title cards for the first 45 seconds before the trailer visuals begin and that is not something a studio marketing department would ever risk doing.)  So it’s been interesting, and heartening, to see that in spite of the unusual structure we used,  it seems to be catching a bit of a wave of viewer interest and we wanted to acknowledge who has helped cause this.

The surge of views of the fan trailer began when Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News published this:

If you haven’t seen JOHN CARTER, this fan trailer nails it! This is how the film could have been sold…

The film is pretty damn terrific.   I absolutely hang this terrible performance on the marketing of the film.  The movie was presented to the public with no context.   No introduction to the genre significance and certainly very little sense of the true grandeur that Stanton had in his film.   This fan trailer that the Reluctant Austinite made me aware of rights that.  Unfortunately, I can’t place it in front of 500 million sets of eyes, but you do.   If you like it, share it.  Films sometimes live or die by those of us that let them.   The brutality that the media covers abused this film is truly beyond reason.  Keep an open mind and get curious…

AICN is one of the most influential movie sites, particularly in this type of genre, so (according to the Youtube stats), about 20,000 people viewed the trailer from the AICN embed.  In turn, that led to some additional coverage on other sites. including the influential iO9 sci fi movie site, which contributed another 15,000 views:

Now this is the trailer Disney should have used to market John Carter

We’ve poked and prodded at the baffling marketing campaign for Disney’s John Carter, which did little to tout the rich history and alien setting behind Andrew Stanton’s movie. The team at the John Carter Files goes several steps further, creating a fan-cut trailer that explains just why anyone should care about this movie.

The Geek Tyrant headline reads:

Epically Perfect Fan Made Trailer.

It’s amazing what a trailer can do for a film. The reason John Carter failed at the box office was the way it was marketed. It was handled completely wrong. Had Disney released a trailer like the one you are about to watch, John Carter would have probably been a big hit with audiences.

In the Retroist, the coverage goes like this:

There is something that I am very upset with though…and that is the marketing of the film, it’s been talked about by almost every site on the web, and as can be seen below from the John Carter Files YouTube channel there are a great number of fans that refuse to be content with the media that has been offered for the film.

We thank everyone who has written about it and encourage fans of the movie to do what you can to help rebuild the film, the filmmakers, and the underlying literary property–all of which have been deeply damaged recently.  We will continue to do our part in what is going to be a long struggle — but one which we are sure will at least end with the film being recognized as deserving a much better fate than the train wreck which we have been observing.

Here is Fan Trailer 2 “Heritage”.  As before, we want to acknowledge that it draws upon the “sizzle reel” that was originally cut by Erik Jessen, one of the films’ editors, and the music is Nick Ingram’s “Mars”.

Oh, and here is something we just discovered — an interview clip where Andrew Stanton talks about our first fan trailer. It’s cued to the part where he talks about our trailer, calling it “fantastic” and saying “this is the DNA of the film”.

And here is that first fan trailer:

<sigh>